Battlestations

by S. M. Stirling

  “How would that drone have done that?”

  “Well, it’s a garbage ram, it shoves stuff into the recycle chute to the hoppers on five. Normally there’s a canister there, when it gets to a certain weight, the drone dumps it into the lock.”

  “Why would M. Haskins have been there?”

  “It looked like he was trying to fix the lock. It was jammed, something out of the last canister that got dumped, that happens. He was big enough to make the drone think it had another load waiting, so it went to dump him.”

  “Isn’t there a safety of some kind?”

  “It was turned off. It’s usual to run a bypass when you work on a lock, the door won’t open with the safety off.”

  “And the drone doesn’t have a human recognition circuit?”

  “Most of ’em do, but this was an old one, a Brooks bug brain, it hadn’t been upgraded yet.”

  “Strange set of coincidences, isn’t it?”

  Rawlins shrugged. “Accidents happen. Last year a hatch tech got spat into vac without her suit and there’s five different safeguards that missed her. Karma.”

  “Haskins was a pretty big and strong man,” Gil said. “He was looking right at the drone when he died. Any ideas as to why he didn’t just shove it away?”

  Rawlins shook his head, irritated. “Look, f’l’owman, I’m supposed to be an installer, I didn’t design the station, okay? It was bad juju and I’m sorry he’s got to be dead, but don’t ask me.”

  “His SO is in pain and she’s looking for reasons.”

  “Tell Linju I said I’m sorry. You can tell her I said I think she’s off the track here, too.”

  “Thanks for your time, M. Rawlins. I expect you’re right.”

  The cool shook his head. “Officially, it’s an accident,” he said.

  Gil had offered to buy the man lunch in exchange for his time, and the pair of them sat at the little cafe a lot of the military noncoms liked, F3, where orange shaded into yellow. The cool drank splash, a mild form of beer, and Gil sipped at coffee. The cool’s name was Millet. Once again, Gil’s recorder was running.

  “Unofficially?”

  “Well, my opinion is suicide.”

  Gil blinked. “What makes you say that?”

  “Hell, he was looking at the drone when it got him. He had to have let it happen. Guy like that could have picked the damn thing up and thrown it one-handed, he wanted, he was a big sucker, muscular as a gorilla. I think he wanted to get around the suicide clause in his insurance, so he made it look like an accident. Only thing that makes any sense.”

  “He didn’t have any enemies who might want to see him dead?”

  Millet shrugged. “Maybe, but not any we could find. He spent a lot of time in the gym, he was well liked, nobody with any grudges. Nice guy, minded his own biz, didn’t step on anybody’s toes. We did a shallow scan on everybody who could have been in there with him. That’s not a high security area or anything until you get outside, but the doors are wired to record anybody who comes or goes. There were a couple dozen workers in and out of there that day and we checked ’em all. Nobody made the scanner squeal. So it had to be an accident or suicide.”

  Gil nodded. “Thanks for the help.”

  “No problem.”

  At the medical center, the shrugging continued.

  “What is your interest in this, M. Sivart?”

  “Haskin’s significant other has some questions about the death.”

  The medic, a portly woman of fifty, shook her head. “No question about it. He got squashed like a fly.”

  “Any drugs in his system?”

  “No, he was clean.”

  “I see. Any history of depression?”

  “Not in my records, no.”

  “Could something have happened to him before he was crushed? Some illness or trauma hidden by the injury?”

  “Yes, of course. We would have found an infarct so it wasn’t an MI, but a nodal malfunction is possible, though I don’t think this was the case. Not a CVA—a stroke, we’d have seen that. The man was very well developed, he had an excellent cardiovascular system.”

  “Thank you, Doctor.”

  After he finished with the medic, Gil walked to the tube that would take him back to his shop. So far, it had played out about as he had expected. The one anomaly was the dead man’s physical position when he died. It nagged at Gil, but by itself wasn’t enough to indicate homicide. Murder was rare on the station; there had been a couple during the out voyage, but both of those had been easily solved, crimes of passion. A man had been stabbed by his lover when she caught him in bed with her mother; the other was a fight in a bar that had escalated, the killer waiting outside for the victim and bashing him over the head with—of all things—a bicycle. No mystery either time.

  On the way to the tube, a beeper signaled the start of a military drill. Gil stopped walking. The tubes would be closed for the duration of the drill, could be two minutes, could be ten, depending on the computer scenario. Already all decks above Yellow would be buttoned up, and Military Command Center would be issuing orders to affected personnel. Sometimes the civilian population was included in the drills, having to rig for combat, but those were fairly rare. If it was military only, then the commercial comchans would still be working. Since he wasn’t going anywhere, he put in a com to Linju Vemeer.

  “Yes?”

  “Gil Sivart, M. Vemeer. I’m checking some things. Was M. Haskins depressed about anything?”

  “Depressed?”

  “Unhappy. Distressed in any way.”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “The possibility of suicide has been raised.”

  “Suicide? That’s crazy! Hask would never do that!”

  “You sound very certain.”

  “Listen, the night before he died, he and I were together. We had a wonderful time. We were talking about getting a formal cohab contract. He wanted to have children. So did I.”

  “And you say the evening was pleasant?”

  “We drank wine, had a meal that he cooked, and then made love five times. That pleasant enough?”

  Gil stared at the com unit. Well. A man who had made love five times in a single evening certainly didn’t seem to be a candidate for suicide, unless fucking himself to death was the way he wanted to go. And considering fathering children argued against it, too.

  “Thank you,” Gil said. “I’ll get back to you.”

  Hmm. Just for the sake of the puzzle, assume that it was murder. The means was evident. What would the motive be? Who had the opportunity? If you knew one, you could get the other, but which would be easier to determine?

  The all-clear chime sounded. The drill was over.

  Gil headed toward the tubes.

  The kung fu class lasted an hour and a half, after which Gil usually did a short meditation alone in his cube. Because he was sitting quietly on a floor cushion trying to clear stray thoughts from his mind, he heard the sound he probably would have missed had he been watching the trivid or listening to music. A tiny click in the hallway outside his cube.

  He thought about the sound. His cube was the last one in a feeder hall cul-de-sac two hundred meters or so away from his shop. He had chosen the unit because it was at the end of the hall and thus apt to be quieter than most. There wouldn’t be any foot or cart traffic going past, just the residents of the two cubes slightly uphall from him, neither of whom had much company. The old man to Gil’s left was retired from his former job as a food service tech and was generally asleep by 2100. The cube to Gil’s right belonged to a woman having a liaison with two other women a level down, and she spent most of her time in the larger cubicle belonging to one of them. So—who’s there?

  Came another click. It was right outside his door.

  He sat there for another two minutes, but his meditation was shot, he might as well satisfy his curiosity. He unwound his legs, stood, and moved toward the door.

  The door slid open and Gil stepped out
into the hall. Nope. Nobody home. The question was, what would have made that clicking sound? It was familiar, though he couldn’t place it at the moment. Still, the hall was empty and there was nothing to indicate anybody had been there. He turned to go back into his cube. Another mysterious noise in the night, probably some kind of plastic or metal stress—

  Wait a second. The circuit breaker.

  The plastic cover to his cube’s circuit breaker had a latch on it, so when you opened or shut the little plate, the latch made a small noise. And the breaker was immediately next to the door, where they were for nearly all the cubes on the station. They could be locked, to keep bored children from playing their little switch-off-all-the-lights games, but hardly anybody ever actually used the locks, certainly Gil didn’t. The lights hadn’t gone off, there hadn’t been any interruption of power in his cube, so why would anybody have opened and closed the panel?

  Gil reached for the circuit breaker’s cover and opened it. There was the click, sure enough.

  Whoops. Hello?

  A black plastic nodule about the size of his thumb was stuck to the board, just over the cube’s shower circuit.

  A cold finger jammed itself into his bowels. Gil recognized the device. There was a similar, smaller unit augmenting the battery of his molding table. Damn! A power pusher!

  Since all water had to be recycled on the station, there were shunt circuits built into showers, fountains, sinks, toilets, and whatnot for proper recovery of gray and stink water. And since water and electricity were a dangerous combination, special care was taken to be certain that amperages and even voltages were kept very low in those systems that came into contact with people.

  The device stuck to his circuit breaker was a specialized piece of hardware, used to amplify and focus electrical current. A kind of superconducting capacitor with microcomputers and a Henley’s Loop, a pusher could take regular power, store and step it up on the order of fifty to a hundred thousand times, then discharge it as needed, over a programmed period—or all at once. Thus it could allow a small battery to operate even a very heavy machine for a time, inducing the needed current by focused broadcast.

  Gil stared at the pusher. He felt cold. If this thing were operative, and if it were set as he suspected, then the next time he stepped into his shower, he would have been in real trouble. The five or six volts of operating current in the thin wires of his shower, the head and floor and wall recovery systems, would suddenly have become maybe six hundred thousand volts, with a big rise in amperage, too. The wiring would surely have overloaded and spewed much of the excess juice into the water showering down upon him and puddled at his feet. And a wet body grounded in more water has little electrical resistance.

  He would have fried like soypro in boiling oil.

  And if he hadn’t heard that small sound in the hall, it was likely they would have succeeded. He could have died in the shower and not have been missed for a few days, giving the murderer plenty of time to come and remove the pusher. An unfortunate accident, it would seem, some freak induction thing with the shower, and wasn’t that too bad?

  If somebody wanted him dead, then they had to have a reason. Unless they were unhappy with a model he’d sold them, then that reason must be connected to his other activities. He got along with the kung fu class and he didn’t have any major enemies he knew about due to his personal history, not on the station, anyway. The thieves he had brokered with various organizations were usually grateful to him that they weren’t going to do locktime or brainscramble. That left the investigation he was pursuing. And if somebody was willing to kill him to keep him from continuing it, then Haskin’s death surely hadn’t been an accident or suicide, because who would care?

  Despite his brush against death, Gil smiled. Seems as if he had gathered more parts to this puzzle than he had figured. Things were getting interesting.

  In the morning Gil called Linju Vemeer. They arranged to meet for breakfast. “This won’t cause you a problem with work?” he asked.

  “I don’t need to work any longer, M. Sivart. Hask saw to that.”

  “Call me Gil.”

  “All right. Gil. Might as well call me Linju.”

  The restaurant on Green 3 was an “outdoor” cafe, with tables outside of the place where it opened into the deck park. The small trees and open space had been carefully created to give the illusion of a much a larger area, and it was pleasant to sit sipping coffee with a handsome woman, watching children play under the artificial sun on the live grass in the park.

  “You were right,” Gil said. “Hask was murdered.”

  Her face tightened, then relaxed a little. “How do you know?”

  He told her about the incident at his cube. She was disturbed by it and said so.

  “Have you called the cools?”

  “No. Not yet. I would rather have something more to give them when I do.”

  “It could be dangerous for you to continue. I would understand if you stopped.”

  He smiled. “I’ll be careful. I put a lock on my breaker.”

  “This doesn’t make any sense, you know. Why anybody would want to kill Hask?”

  Gil said, “Well, if we believe that he was killed and we know how, all we need to do now is figure out who or why. Either of those will eventually give us the other.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I’ll have another talk with ISU. Maybe I can narrow things some. Oh, and one other thing. If the killer tried for me, he or she might also feel disposed to try for you.”

  She looked startled. “Me?”

  “If you were gone, they might assume the investigation would stop. It wouldn’t, but they might not know that.”

  She looked at him. “What would you advise?”

  “Simple caution. Don’t walk down any deserted corridors alone. Keep your doors locked. Take care when you shower. Call me immediately if you see or hear anything suspicious.”

  “I will.”

  After she left, Gil walked toward the tube station and entered a lift to take him to see Millet. He didn’t really think Linju was in danger, but it didn’t hurt to be careful. As the tube, only half filled with passengers, lifted, the newsproj lit and began to rattle on about what was happening on the station and in the galaxy beyond. A group of visiting Gersons, those teddy-bear-like aliens, were enjoying their tour of the Hawking. The amphibian race of Silbers were engaged in battle with the Ichtons, the latter’s fleet having laid siege to, and nearly having sacked, the Silbers’ planet. In the financial news, a number of major businesses had recently suffered reversals, including among them the Luna Industrial Complex, the Milview Starfreight Lines, and the Kuralti Brothers chain of stores.

  Gil listened idly to the news. Sometimes he forgot that the Hawking was an instrument of war, sailing the vacuum of deep space to fight against the Ickies who would, if not stopped, wipe out every other race they met. A single murder didn’t seem like much compared to planetcide; still, he couldn’t do much to affect a war but he might be able to help here. Life, after all, was lived in the details.

  Indeed, it was the small details that added up to make the whole. For instance, he knew that whoever had meant to kill him was technically adept. It required a certain amount of knowledge to know how to use an electrical pusher, and to come by one without it being missed or accounted for. Gil had done a search of pubinfo files and had discovered that there had not been any sales of this particular model and brand of pusher to private citizens recorded in the last month. Likely it had been stolen. If he could find out where the pusher had come from, it would help the search for whoever had taken it. He had an idea about who that might be, but he needed more.

  Gil met Millet. They stood in the back of the big rec room on Dark Yellow watching the skaters slide in their smooth boots across the low-fric surface.

  “I checked you out,” the cool said. “You have some friends in high places.”

  Gil shrugged. “I’ve done some favors for people.�
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  “Yeah. I heard.”

  “Do you suppose I could get a copy of the names of those people who came and went to Haskins’s location on the day he died?”

  Millet shook his head. “That wouldn’t be likely, no. The privacy rules wouldn’t allow us to reveal that outside official channels. Why do you want it?”

  “Because I’m sure he was murdered.”

  Millet sharpened, his eagerness apparent. “You have proof?”

  “Not yet. The list of names might help me get it. As would the results of the scans.”

  Millet shook his head. “I can’t reveal them. It would be my ass if anybody found out. Talking invasion of privacy, civil torts, like that.”

  A skater fell in front of them and laughed as she slid spinning across the floor. Other skaters leaped over her or veered to the sides to keep from tripping.

  “You’re a patrol officer,” Gil said. “Senior grade?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So you could get to be a subcommander if a slot came open?”

  “Yeah, me and ten other seniors. Lot of competition for the nonmilitary openings.”

  “A nice rise in status and pay, though, right?”

  “Yeah. What are you shooting at here, Sivart?”

  “Well, let’s suppose here that you uncovered a murder and another attempted murder and caught the perpetrator. Would that give you an edge for promotion?”

  “An edge? Yeah. Sharp enough to cut anybody else out of the way.”

  “Suppose that I could give you that? I figure out who it is and give you the reason and enough evidence to justify a deep scan. You get all the credit.”

  Millet watched the skaters circle past. He was silent for maybe thirty seconds. Then, “What do you get out of it?”

  “I get to solve the puzzle. And you owe me a favor.”

  Millet looked at him. “That’s it?”

  “That, and the gratitude of a not-quite-beautiful woman.”

  “Ah.”

  “Well?”

  “Let’s go someplace private,” Millet said.

  Gil had in his flatscreen a no-print-no-transfer copy of the lists he wanted, courtesy of the ambitious Millet. The names were simple enough, there were thirty-four of them. And although he wasn’t a tech, the results of the truthscans were easy enough to follow. They were only shallow scans, verifications of questions asked, as opposed to deep scans that could dig into the memory and unconscious mind of a subject, were he willing to speak or not. Still, shallow scans worked better than basic lie detectors. When asked about the death of M. Haskins, none of the thirty-four people questioned registered any direct knowledge of the cause.